The common school movement has long constituted one of the defining themes and primary focal points of scholarship in the history of American education. Although this push toward a tax-supported, universal public education was a national movement, no state has been as closely identified with it as Massachusetts, and no individual recognized as taking a more important lead in the dissemination of common school ideology than Horace Mann. The region and the person, so closely linked with each other, were both crucial in advancing the common school cause throughout the nation and in stamping it into the American historical and cultural fabric.

In his 1857 manual The American Citizen: His Rights and Duties According to the Spirit of the Constitution of the United States, John Henry Hopkins described the citizen as” ‘a partner in the republic,’ “who had the right “to express his honest convictions, in word or writing, concerning every candidate for office, and every political measure contemplated or adopted by those who are in possession of the legislative or executive function.” In this passage, Hopkins expressed the common nineteenth-century assumption that citizenship entailed political activism. Hopkins and his contemporaries might have disagreed about what kinds of political activity were appropriate or effective, but they did not question that citizenship was essentially a political status, involving active participation in the public sphere.

The dramatic success of Jesuit schools since the Society admitted the first lay, or extern, students to its college in Gandìa, Spain, in 1546 is unparalleled in the history of education. By the time Ignatius of Loyola died in 1556, the Society had thirty-one schools, with more than ten times that number, 373, at the death of the fifth Father General, Claudio Aquaviva, in 1615. During Aquaviva's tenure, in response to this educational explosion, a comprehensive set of school regulations, the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu, was drafted, debated, and finally promulgated in 1599 after fifteen years of preparation. The letter of transmission included Aquaviva's injunction that “this plan of studies … ought to be observed in the future by all of ours, setting aside all other plans.”